Off-Panel: October 15, 2014
And now for some links, which I think is a kind of opossum. And there’s a Toby Zieglerism to start off your day right.
“Batman is just a rich guy with an affinity for bats who’s playing out his insane fantasy of single-handedly ridding Gotham of crime,” he says. “How is that heroic? […] Can you really argue that Batman is good for Gotham? I mean, in the Batman universe, crime is caused by 1.) evil people who just want to see the world burn, and 2.) stupid people who follow the evil but charismatic cat-persons/Joker/Penguin — God, the villains in Batman are terrible!”
YA author and webcam enthusiast John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) hates Batman. But you know who else says that? Clayface. Don’t be Clayface. Any of them. Even the nice little girl one that Robin befriended in the animated series. Actually, I’d bet John Green would like that episode.
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“The character design overall was not how I saw it in my mind’s eye, but it was how I wished I saw it. I wrote “Anda’s Story” in 2002 thinking about EverQuest and obviously that aesthetic is generations behind us now. And I like that we didn’t get Warcraft. What we got in the game design was something different enough. It has that thing that I try to do with my prose settings which is to be indeterminate, possibly counter-factual, presenting a mirrored future that might be the present, that might be tomorrow, that might be ten years from now. I could see a game studio produce Coursegold online now, or never producing, which I thought was great, just great.”
Cory Doctorow talks to Multiversity about his new OGN, In Real Life, a collaboration with artist Jen Wang.
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“As the title of this post suggests, I am a relative newcomer to manga. I’ve seen my fair share of anime and devoured every volume of Pluto Volume 1 Naoki Urasawa Shogakukan / Viz Media 2003 Sailor Moon and Full Metal Alchemist, but I’ve never really attempted to explore the great body of work that is Japanese comics—which in hindsight seems rather silly, given how much I enjoyed those earlier forays. But now I can happily add Pluto by Naoki Urasawa to my small (but growing) list.”
Christa Seeley of Women Write About Comics makes the case for Urasawa’s Pluto, a manga serial yours truly considers one of the best comics printed in the last 800 years. So, ditto.
